Responding to the call to arms, 3 million African American men registered for armed service during the war, and one third of them were selected. They were inducted into a segregated military offering few opportunities that matched up with the kind of black aspirations revealed in the bluesmen’s songs.30 On the eve of Pearl Harbor, blacks constituted only 6 percent of the army, and three-quarters of black servicemen and women found themselves restricted to transportation and other supply-related duties. The navy allowed blacks as mess men only, and the marine corps refused to admit African Americans at all. Secretary of War Henry Stimson attempted to justify the military’s relegation of blacks to noncombat roles, saying, “Leadership is not imbedded in the Negro race yet.” There were significant exceptions within the military’s wider policy of segregation, but, for the most part, black enlistees could expect a military career in a Jim Crow army, until manpower shortages in 1945 forced leadership to substitute black soldiers into white units on an individual basis. Black soldiers were denied service at the same restaurants that accommodated German POWs being held at southern army bases, and racial violence broke out in many southern military posts, most notably Fort Bragg, North Carolina.31
One might argue that the patriotic war blues were meant to appease southern whites by showing blacks’ loyalty to the country, but whites were not the audiences for these songs or for so-called race records. Ironically, when whites were known to be part of the audience, that is, in the increasingly mixed-audience nightclubs in the urban North, the music was less bellicose and patriotic. An excellent example was Josh White’s “Uncle Sam Says,” recorded in 1941. White, an old collaborator friend of Walter Roland (of “Red Cross Blues” fame), had by the 1940s become part of the New York City folk music / Popular Front set with Huddie Ledbetter and Woody Guthrie. In his wartime music, White maintained a hopeful tone while simultaneously bemoaning the barriers facing African Americans. In the first verse, Uncle Sam reminds blacks of their “place”:
Well, airplanes flyin’ ‘cross the land and sea,
Everbody’s flyin’ but a Negro like me.
Uncle Sam says, “Your place is on the ground,”
“When I fly my airplanes, don’t want no Negro ‘round.”
The place was spatial—on the ground and not in the air—but also social; “Everybody . . . but a Negro” could be modern by experiencing flight. In White’s verse, flying an airplane was like a show or spectacle that blacks could not be admitted to. In the second verse, White went further, evoking symbols of black domestic subservience within the military context: “All they got is a messboy’s job for me / Uncle Sam says, ‘Keep on your apron, son.’ “ “You know,” Uncle Sam taunted the singer-subject, “I ain’t gonna let you shoot my big navy gun.” He sang about being drafted into the army, only to find “the same old Jim Crow.” These explicitly political verses may not have been the tradition in general blues lyrics, but along with the socially aware protest songs of Ledbetter, they demonstrate that African American musicians were willing to follow Billie Holiday’s lead and push the limits of free and critical expression. But White’s was not an angry message. Having pointed out the injustices of the Jim Crow army, he made his call for unity and reform.
If you ask me I think democracy is fine,
I mean democracy without the color line.
Uncle Sam says, “We’ll live the American way,”
Let’s get together and kill Jim Crow today.
National unity was important in the war effort, had been important in the New Deal years, and was the basis of American civic pluralism in the Roosevelt years. After all, there may be “two camps for black and white,” but “when the trouble starts,” White sang, “we’ll all be in that same big fight.” The enemy would not segregate, White warned; all Americans were threatened by fascism. What defined Americans and set them apart from the fascists was the principle of democracy. The singer seemed to be arguing that American victory rested first on American values and living up to those values. Ledbetter also aimed for consensus; in August 1940 he cut a track for Alan Lomax entitled “The Roosevelt Song,” wherein he praised the president and celebrated America as a peace-loving nation.32
While White’s song of military exclusion and segregation rang true in 1941 when he recorded “Uncle Sam Says,” the Roosevelt administration maintained the racial open-mindedness that had emerged in the Second New Deal. In addition to government openness on racial issues, black leaders, institutions, and citizens made demands on the system to stimulate change. While the public will for change sometimes erupted in uncontrolled passions, as in the case of the summer rioting in Detroit and Harlem in 1943, at other times black leadership was able to focus popular angst for peaceful change. A. P. Randolph’s threats of mass demonstrations and protests induced Roosevelt to sign Executive Order 8802, establishing the Fair Employment Practices Commission to increase defense industry employment opportunities for black Americans, especially in places like Chicago where African Americans had local political power. The defense jobs, though often temporary, stimulated further urban migration among blacks, and wartime jobs helped those who had moved to the cities to recover from the Depression. People who remained on the South’s farms enjoyed higher agricultural prices as a result of the war buildup and America’s supplying its allies.33 In addition to establishing the FEPC, the Roosevelt administration likewise assured African American leaders that blacks would be put “proportionately into the combat services,” and although the services remained segregated as a whole, there was much in the collective black military experience during World War II that African Americans could later recount with pride.34 Two African American seamen became the nation’s first war heroes on account of their actions at Pearl Harbor, and, by the end of the war, the navy had successfully “experimented” with a predominately black crew on a destroyer, the USS Mason. The army tried integrating small units with mixed success in Hawaii, a community with more fluid race relations than the mainland United States. The marine corps abandoned its lily-white policy and enlisted 17,000 African Americans by war’s end. The all-black Tuskegee Flying Unit airmen, like Joe Louis, found themselves in positive public roles that their African American peers a generation before could have recognized only in their dreams. And, in addition to personal accolades and confidence, each service member had a collective experience. From training camp to coursework through the GI Bill after discharge, black recruits moved through military and educational institutions that emphasized standardization as well as finding the value of each individual.35
For the most part, bluesmen from the Lower Mississippi Valley sang war songs about duty, self-denial, and opportunity. The patriotic tone established in Gaither’s, Sykes’s, and Williamson’s recordings in 1939 and 1940 remained the common refrain for the rest of the war. With the exception of White’s ballad, musicians did not generally reflect the apathy and detachment displayed by a black sharecropper who responded to news of Pearl Harbor with the following quip: “I heard the Japs done declared war on you white folks.” Instead, musicians represented black individuals and families who, according to historian James Cobb, increasingly became “more fearless and ready to state what they believe[d] to be the basic rights of the group.” In “American Defense” (1942), Son House urges his fellows to defend the “red, white, and blue that represents you”:
You ought to do everything you can.
Buyin’ war savin’ stamps,
Young men, go to the camps,
Be brave and take a stand.
Alan Lomax witnessed this unified spirit on display at a sending-off rally for black soldiers in Clarksdale, Mississippi. “We must remember we are citizens,” Lomax recalled the speaker as saying, “for our uniform is a badge of citizen-ship.”36
From well-known artists such as House to much more obscure, rural guitar pickers that were captured on folklorists’ and talent scouts’ field recordings, the unity of American spirit was evident among black musicians. In a 1943 fie
ld recording in Georgia, guitarist Buster “Buzz” Ezell tried to use the opportunity created by the nation’s battle with fascism to redraw the bounds of citizenship. Sounding like Charley Patton, with a gravelly voice and raw, country guitar sound, Ezell’s “Roosevelt and Hitler” uses the backdrop of wartime consensus to deny Jim Crow’s power to suppress the patriotism of the South’s African Americans.
Hitler tried to fool the Negroes by saying they ought not to fight,
Said, “You have no home in the country, no flag and equal rights.”
But the niggers knewed the best, their deeds did prove the test,
There’s strange things a-happenin’ in this land.
“Strange things” indeed, when Jim Crow-era black musicians expressed such enthusiastic allegiance to the nation. According to Ezell’s musical retelling of the war’s events, Germany and Japan learned that the United States was a formidable enemy, but most important is the musician’s assertion of an inclusive definition of Americans as a distinct “race” of people. Ezell hoped World War II would do what many folks thought would have happened in World War I—that national creed would outweigh skin color.
Hitler called them Japanese, they could not help from cryin’,
Said, “If you go up against that race, you’re comin’ out behind.
If you try to take their place,
You cannot keep from dyin’.”
There’s strange things a-happenin’ in this land.37
Since Ezell’s figurative “conversation” in this verse takes place between Hitler and the Japanese, his words, “that race,” refer to Americans. Ezell’s lyrics deflect antagonism away from black Americans—whose “deeds did prove the test”— and, by implication, uses Hitler’s dogma of Aryan supremacy to cast doubt on theories of racial hierarchy in general. Ezell’s obscure guitar blues, “Roosevelt and Hitler,” was not an anomaly, nor were its sentiments rare. Many other musicians began using more malleable definitions of race during the war. Another relatively unknown musician, Ernest Blunt, also known as the “Florida Kid,” did a piano tune called “Hitler Blues” in which he utilized notions of Nazi-style Aryan supremacy to break down Jim Crow-style white-black racial models: “Hitler says some of our people are white, says some are brown and black / But Hitler says all that matters to him, they look just alike.”38
Ezell and Blunt were among many bluesmen who used alternative definitions of race during the war to complicate or reshape racial conceptions. After Roosevelt’s death in 1945, bluesmen and other black musicians drew familial connections between themselves and the president they adored. Many black Americans named their children after the Roosevelts, and African American musicians sang about FDR as their “father.”39 At least one bluesman, Big Joe Williams, compared Roosevelt to Jesus.40 Through their adoration of FDR, bluesmen pushed more pluralistic conceptions of race in America. Less than a week after Roosevelt’s death on April 12, 1945, New Orleans native “Champion” Jack Dupree acknowledged the late president’s ability to build coalitions and unify the nation.
I sure feel bad with tears runnin’ down my face,
I sure feel bad with tears runnin’ down my face,
I lost a good friend, was a credit to our race. Yes! Yes!
FDR was everybody’s friend,
FDR was everybody’s friend,
Well, he helped everybody, right up ’til the end.
Later, in a spoken segment of the track, Dupree used another inclusive definition of race: “Yes, we lost a good friend. Good man—credit to our race. Yes! Yes!”41 If not for the history of Jim Crow segregation in Creole New Orleans, Dupree’s liberal application of the word race might be attributed to his growing up in the well-stirred gene pool that is the Crescent City. However, Champion Jack’s word choice should not be dismissed as mere coincidence. Dupree utilized a positive, inclusive definition of race based on his and others’ affinity for FDR. Gaither and Ezell used negative relationships, lumping white and black Americans together in the group that opposed Germany and Japan. Either way, these blues artists felt compelled to use the notion of race to describe a nation of like-minded people, unified against oppression and aggression. Such redefinition and liberal use of lexicon was not necessarily indicative of mainstream attitudes in America, but the musicians cited here certainly felt they had equal access to patriotism and nationalism—that World War II, like the Civil War, was not exclusively a white man’s fight, and that America was not exclusively a white man’s country.
Hating the Japanese, Hating Hitler
By claiming for their own various patriotic symbols—the nation’s military pride or FDR’s “fatherhood” to the American people—black southerners found themselves revering the same civic ideals as most of white America, southern and otherwise. Many bluesmen seemed so adamant to assert their patriotism that they embraced the virulent racism directed by white Americans at the Japanese during the war. In this case, blues music marked clear differences along class lines in the attitudes of African Americans. Drawing on newspaper editorials, FBI files on key black leaders, Office of War Information poll data, and published black literature, historians have shown that the more affluent and educated African Americans living in urban centers generally looked favorably on the Japanese and often sympathized with Japanese Americans as victims of racism. Southern-born musicians’ song lyrics indicated they viewed the Japanese in less forgiving terms than the intellectuals of the North—the more the bluesmen identified with the “American race,” the more they hated the Japanese.42
Numerous blues songs of the World War II era invoke racial stereotypes— or direct racial slurs—related to the Japanese enemy. As Japanese American citizens faced internment at a series of detainment camps in the western United States, bluesmen often characterized the Japanese as malicious animals—dogs, snakes, ants—and played on contemporary stereotypes of the Japanese as “teeth and spectacles” or “murderous little ape men,” employing the same cultural tactics as whites who accentuated racial caricatures to degrade and poke fun at blacks and other nonwhites.43 Recording for the Bluebird label in 1942, Doctor Clayton vocalized a scathing indictment of the Japanese in “Pearl Harbor Blues.” He began by recounting the facts.
December the seventh, nineteen hundred and forty-one,
The Japanese flew over Pearl Harbor, dropping bombs by the ton.
After Clayton’s invocation of the date destined to “live in infamy,” he dedicates two verses to maligning the Japanese. First, he curses them as “ungrateful” “stray dogs.” Second, he suggests that their surprise attack is evidence that they lack the fundamental principles of fair fighting that even animals display.
The Japanese is so ungrateful, just like a stray dog on the street,
Well, he’ll bite the hand that feeds him, soon as he gets enough to eat.
Some say the Japanese is hard fighters, but any dummy ought to know,
Even a rattlesnake won’t bite you in the back, he will warn you before he strikes his blow.
In contrast, Clayton imagines Roosevelt as a righteous isolationist who was forced to lead a defiant nation in a war of self-defense against the treacherous Japanese.
I turned on my radio, and I heard Mr. Roosevelt say,
“We wanted to stay out of Europe and Asia, but now we all got a debt to pay.”
We even sold the Japanese brass and scrap iron, and it makes my blood boil in the vein,
‘Cause they made bombs and shells out of it, and they dropped them on Pearl Harbor just like rain.44
The title of Clayton’s musical counteroffensive against the Japanese—”Pearl Harbor Blues”—implies nothing about the singer’s feelings toward the enemy, but other musicians chose song titles that revealed their racism.
A popular war song covered by Lucky Millinder’s Orchestra, “We’re Gonna Have to Slap the Dirty Little Jap,” was, perhaps, the best of example of such transparency. Millinder was a native Alabaman and gained influence during World War II as a jazz bandleade
r in New York. The more popular rendition of the song was performed by a white country band, but Millinder’s version featured a full jazz-swing ensemble and crooning vocals juxtaposed with violent and hateful lyrics.
We’re gonna have to slap the dirty little Jap,
And Uncle Sam’s the guy who can do it.
We’ll take this double-crosser to the ol’ woodshed,
We’ll start on his bottom and go to his head.
Other verses carried over from earlier versions of the song poked fun at aspects of Japanese spirituality and revealed a kind of muddled and generic concept of “oriental” culture (perhaps for rhyme’s sake) that conflated Chinese American culture (here, chop suey) with Japanese tradition:
The Japs and all their hoo-ee, will be changed into chop suey,
And the risin’ sun will set when we get through it.
Their alibi for fightin’ is to save their face, for ancestors waitin’ in celestial space.
We’ll kick their precious face, down to that other place.
We’ve gotta slap the dirty little Jap.
The unchecked patriotism of the vocalist leads him to glorify the tactics of racial order keeping that Millinder would have witnessed as a young man in Alabama. First, preoccupation with skin color:
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